Natural and man-made disasters. How we treat our
displaced people.

Thank
you for inviting me back to Winnipeg. On my last visit to
your City I had a fantastic tour, courtesy of Tom Carter. I had the opportunity to visit a number of community based agencies and
housing sites, I visited your Mountain Equipment Co-op store, and I was able to
walk the picket line with your locked-out CBC workers.

Winnipegis a fantastic place to be talking about housing, housing history and solutions
to homelessness that go beyond giving homeless people a job cleaning up the
street.

When
I was here last on September 18, 2005 I gave a talk called “Research
with a Pulse” during the early days of the Hurricane Katrina disaster.
Like New Orleans, and more
than any other large city in Canada, Winnipeg has suffered repeated physical, social and economic injury
due to severe flooding.

As
you may recall, 1997 could have been a really tough year for this City when it
was hit with the "Flood of the Century" and just weeks earlier, on
April 5th to the 8th, the so-called “Blizzard of the
Century”.The
Red River did force the evacuation of over 28,000 people in Manitobaand it had a direct economic impact of roughly $500 million,
but Winnipegitself largely escaped because the City began planning and
preparing months in advance for a worse case scenario.3,000 civic employees along with more than 8,500 men and women from the
Canadian Forces and thousands of volunteers from across the country came
together in advance of the flood to prevent a disaster.

Louisiana on the other hand, lacked an adequate plan to evacuate New Orleans, despite years of research that predicted a disaster equal
to or worse than Katrina. Even after
a disaster test, run a year earlier, that exposed weaknesses in evacuation and
recovery, state officials still failed to come up with any solutions. The flooding of
New Orleans, like Canada’s homeless situation and housing crisis, were man-made
disasters that could have been prevented.

The
World Health Organization describes a disaster as:

“Any
occurrence that causes damage, ecological disruption, loss of human life,
deterioration of health and health services on a scale sufficient to warrant an
extraordinary response from outside the affected community.”

From
the examples of both Winnipegand Katrina, we are now learning that the devastation caused
by nature cannot be isolated from man-made structures, programmes and policies. The point of my talk today is that Canada’s homeless situation and housing crisis,
like Katrina, were man-made disasters that could easily have been
prevented, and in the case of Canada’s
disaster, it is still not too late to bring about an end to the growing
devastation and despair.

Canada’s housing history is linked to our military history.

In order to make my point clear, it is
probably best that I start with a bit of a history lesson. I want to talk about what seems to be this country’s forgotten legacy,
our National Housing Programme, but I will begin by putting things into
historical context by talking a little bit about my grandfather’s story,
something my mother reminded me about recently.

My
grandfather was away during the Second World War for over 5 years while my
grandmother raised four children.He
became an employee of the Grand Trunk Railways. There was no union in those days; you were paid only for the time you
could work. Working people in his
lifetime were subject to horrific strikes and abuse from the police. Later, during his time with the Canadian National Railway, there were
improvements. The union helped to
change working conditions. The
mechanics at the CNR were closer to the future CAW workers than any other
working group and were the beginning of the climb to a middle class.

There
was lots of housing to rent when they first moved to Stratford, Ontario - small 2-story 3 bedroom brick homes, with hardwood floors, wood stoves
in the kitchen and coal furnaces in dark dismal basements. The lots were a
nice comfortable size, tree-lined, with cement sidewalks and paved roads. People lived in these houses with up to 10
children. They were not seen
as slums.

Before
he died at 96 years of age, he told my mom that the middle class, which had
appeared in his lifetime, was struggling to maintain their status. He saw
that the social benefits achieved after the war were disappearing. He could never understand why there was always money for wars but
never a penny for affordable housing and social programs.

My grandfather was a CCF member and he
had a sharp political mind.I wish
he were here today to help me understand the cruelty and the absurdity of
today’s political climate. I’m
sure that he would be astonished that so many continue to have so little, and
that there are so few in power that really seem to care.

One of the social benefits achieved
after the war, that he saw us losing was our national housing programme. Most people know the Tommy Douglas story, how we achieved our Medicare
programme, but I have learned in my travels across this country, that not many
know the history of how we got our national housing programme.

During World War II, the Wartime Housing
Corporation built 46,000 units, mostly for war-workers and they also helped
repair and modernize thousands of existing units. But, when the war ended, more than a million Canadians in the armed
forces were ready to return to peacetime life, creating a housing demand that
was unprecedented.

In
1945, the federal government declared
Torontoan “emergency shelter” area, forbidding people from moving there unless
they were starting a job deemed essential

In
1947, Toronto Mayor Saunders put an ad in newspapers saying “Acute Housing
Shortage in
Toronto– do not come”

In
1946, 600 homeless veterans protested and took control of the vacant Hotel
Vancouver as a protest. They
held the building for more than two weeks and due to enormous public
sympathy, it was turned into a hostel for up to 1,200 vets until 1948.

In
1946, when Ottawa Mayor Stanley Lewis refused to promise housing for Vets,
the vets’ leader Franklyn Edward Hanratty ordered an occupation of the
barracks. Eleven vets, their
wives and 18 children took over the Kildare Barracks, unloading a truck with
beds, stoves and washing machines to set up house. More families followed. Later
that year, buildings on the site were leased by the City of
Ottawafrom the federal government for rental housing. (Hmmmm…don’t you have
empty base housing here in
Winnipeg!)

Finally,
Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation was born (now called Canada
Mortgage and Housing)

From the end of World War 2 until 1993
– our national housing program built 650,000 units of affordable housing,
housing 2 million Canadians to this day. That
is our legacy.

So, what went so terribly wrong?

Recipe for disaster

In 1998, homelessness was declared a
national disaster. At that time, I
naively thought it would lead to more than just a federal appointment of a
Minister Responsible for Homelessness and some emergency relief monies. Many of us thought that it was reasonable to expect that the federal
minister responsible for housing might get involved in a solution that would
include housing.

But no, that would have been too logical
a response.

The beginning of mass homelessness began
with the 1993 federal budget, when all new social housing construction was
eliminated. More than 175,000
potential new social housing units were lost when the programme was cancelled.

I had the particular vantage point of
being a Street Nurse working at what can only be described as the epicentre of homelessness in
Canada, at the corner of Sherbourne and Dundas in downtown east Toronto.
It was from that vantage point that I began seeing things I couldn’t at
first explain, and things I couldn’t easily treat or prevent.

In 1995-1996 things got markedly worse. My colleagues and I noticed:

·a new flood of ‘home-grown’ refugees entering the drop-ins and
shelters - people made suddenly homeless due to economic evictions, job loss and
housing affordability issues;

·people were sicker and had more serious conditions and
complications;

·tuberculosis returned with a vengeance;

·there were signs of malnutrition and not enough food in centres;

·more people were sleeping outside and there were more squats and
encampments;

·there were more deaths including the first cluster of deaths, such
as ‘the three freezing deaths’;

·people became stuck in homelessness year after year after year.

Unlike victims of an earthquake or
ice-storm, the people I saw were victims of policy - a direct result of the 1993
cancellation by the federal government of the national housing program and the
1995 cancellation of
Ontario’s housing programme
which coincided with the welfare cuts.

I joined with several colleagues to form
the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee in the summer of 1998.We wrote a report called the State of Emergency Declaration, which
used statistics and referenced the UN Charters that
Canadahad signed. It was a passionate
document, at a very basic literacy level, and it was to the point.

On October 8, 1998
we held a press conference and declared homelessness a National Disaster. What
we saw was not unique to
Toronto.We believed that
Torontowas the canary in the mineshaft of homelessness throughout
Canada.

Ursula Franklin reminded us that it was
a man-made disaster, and here’s what those men did:

At the federal level:

1984
to 1993 – almost $2 billion was cut from housing spending

1993
– all new housing spending was cancelled

1996
– the transfer of housing to the provinces/territories

In
Ontario:

1995 – all new housing spending
was cancelled

1995 - welfare rates were cut by
almost 22%

1998 - housing was downloaded to the
municipalities

In the State
of Emergency Declaration (www.tdrc.net), we called for two
things:

First,
that federal emergency relief monies be released to communities across the
country so they could provide disaster relief for their rapidly growing homeless
populations. This type of effort is what should have happened in the Gulf coast
in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Second,
we called for a long-term solution, the 1% solution – a National Housing Programme,
where all levels of government would spend an additional 1% of their budgets to
build affordable housing. The 1% solution originates from research done by Professor David Hulchanski, who determined that
when our federal, provincial, territorial and municipal governments were
allocating money towards building social housing, they were spending on average
1% of their budgets.

The first item we called for – the
federal emergency relief monies, essentially occurred. Homelessness in
Canadawas catapulted on the national and international scene and we were shamed by UN
condemnations of
Canada’s record on homelessness. Prime
Minister Chrétien appointed Claudette Bradshaw as our first ever Minister Responsible for Homelessness. In 2000, ‘SCPI’ (Supporting Community Partnerships Initiatives)
monies were rolled out across the country - hundreds of millions of dollars! So, Canada had the distinction of having a Minister Responsible for
Homelessness but not a Minister with full responsibility for housing – even
though Alfonso Gagliano was the Minister Responsible for Canada Mortgage and
Housing Corporation.

The hundreds of millions of SCPI
dollars, or as I like to call them ‘disaster relief monies’ have funded new
shelter beds, renovations to drop-ins, shelters and food banks, programs that
target homeless youth, identification replacement programs, even some
transitional housing.

As my good friend and colleague Michael
Shapcott says, people were made a little more comfortable but they were still
homeless.

That program, as you may know has been
recently threatened and is due to be shut down, or ‘sunsetted’ in March
2007.

As I mentioned at the beginning of my
talk, as disasters go, Katrina and homelessness in
Canadahave far too much in common.

Natural and man-made disasters

We know it’s important to be
whistle-blowers before a tragedy occurs but it’s also important to do so
afterwards, no matter how many times the truth has been told and no matter what
speaking out can do to your career. During
the Toronto International Film Festival, I had the opportunity to see Spike
Lee’s documentary
When the levees broke: A Requiem in Four Acts.
He
tells it like it is – he had to.

Spike Lee, in describing his reaction to
the catastrophe in
New Orleansand his motivation for the movie, said:

“It was a
very painful experience to see my fellow American citizens, the majority of them
African-American, in the dire situation they were in.And I was outraged with the slow response of the
federal government.”

These quotes are very similar to what homeless people are
telling me to tell the politicians when I go see them.For example Nancy told me, “tell them that we
are dying.”

For those still living … there is no home.

Climate experts have pointed out that the first flow of climate refugees
has in fact been the people forced to move away from the GulfCoast in the United States, not the low-lying islands in the Pacific
as had been expected. There are an
estimated 250,000 people still displaced from New Orleans.
Pre-Katrina,
30% of the New Orleans population lived below the poverty line
and Lee suggests in his film that class, not just race, was a major contributing
factor to the inadequate federal response. You’ll
see in Lee’s film the violent emotional reaction by New Orleans residents when they realize they are
being called refugees in their own country.

There are painful similarities between the victims of Katrina and those
facing poverty and the housing crisis here in Canada.Both
cases involve purposeful neglect by policy makers and politicians, for example,
decisions to not fund infrastructure whether it be levees or housing, and
decisions to hold back promised monies.In
both cases huge numbers of people are displaced, dislocated and left to die.

In fact, we know that across Canada:

·1.8 million people lack
adequate shelter

·300,000 Canadians are
probably homeless

·65,000 are youth

·Over 10,000 are children

·Thousands are forced to
sleep outside

·Poverty means you die
earlier and get sicker

Earlier this year the United Nations Committee reviewed Canada’s status as signatory to the
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.Their statement says that the reported numbers of homeless people in Canada range from 100,000 to 250,000 and in
addition that the per cent of Canadians in core housing need (i.e. vulnerable to
become homeless) remains high at approximately 15%.The UN recommended that federal, provincial and territorial governments
address homelessness and inadequate housing as a national emergency.This is extremely strong language from this august
body.

The sudden and recent scare over loss of
SCPI monies for this fiscal year meant that we raged across the country and we
won the money back.Yet, today, we
are still fighting for the program to continue after March 31, 2007.

We are always trying to fight to hold
our ground, to save programs from even further cuts or cancellation, let alone
getting any new money.When I was
here in
Winnipegthe last time, I gave the talk called Research with a Pulse where I suggested
research had to have a life, a purpose that would make a difference in
people’s lives – and not just sit on a shelf.

I want to illustrate these points with a
recent example of how desperate the fight is for the most basic life-saving
programmes.

Danger - Heat wave

During this summer’s heat wave, I
pleaded with the City of
Torontoto alter their formula for calling heat alerts so that alerts could be called
early enough to provide people with relief. I pleaded that they not wait as they did several times and call the alert
on a Sunday when both social service agencies and media are down to skeleton
staff; I begged them to relocate the one 24 hour cooling centre out of the Metro
Hall lobby to a more comfortable and accessible location; I begged them to open
more than one 24 cooling centre for a city of 2.5 million people; I begged them
to provide something more substantial than a cereal bar to people using the
cooling centres; and I begged them to modify the City by-law that makes 3rd
and 4th floor windows in rooming and boarding homes restricted from
opening no more than 100 mm (3 inches).

In addition, Michael Shapcott
articulated the need for longer-term solutions, like heat island mitigation
strategies such as green roofs, the development of a maximum temperature by-law
(similar to the minimum temperature by-law we have in winter that landlords have
to comply with), and energy conservation measures for low-income housing.These could include energy rebates for landlords who install
air-conditioning and pilot programmes to that effect.

By summer’s end, the heat alert
formula had not changed, Metro Hall was still designated as the site for the one
24 hour cooling centre, people still only got a cereal bar there and the request
to modify the by-law and look at longer term measures seem to be sitting on the
shelf. It seems nothing can be done
in a Toronto
election year except decide to dump our garbage near
London.

I’m telling you this story because the
lack of innovation meant that thousands of people were left sweltering in hot
rooming houses and high-rises, in some cases with room temperatures above 37
degrees Celsius. The people
suffering and at elevated heat risk included people living in poverty - the
frail elderly, persons experiencing serious mental health or other health
challenges, people on psychiatric medications, people living in isolation, with
mobility issues, under-housed and homeless.

In
Toronto’s Parkdale community alone, the estimate is that the number of people at
elevated heat risk is 1,200.By and
large they do not have the means, or the energy or the motivation to go to the
lobby of a government building to sit and receive a cereal bar.

There were at least 5 heat-related
deaths during the 2005 heat wave in
Toronto, primarily rooming house tenants. Both
the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee and the Toronto Board of Health (of which
I’m a member) requested the Coroner consider holding an inquest into the
heat-related death of James Howell. One
year later, the Coroner advised there would be no inquest because there is
nothing to be learned. Despite
repeated requests to the Coroner’s office, they will not issue that decision
to us in writing.

Broad scientific research has shown that
the greatest life-saving measures in an extreme heat emergency is access to air
conditioning. Yes, it may raise
hydro costs, but we are not talking about people who use cappuccino machines,
food processors, hair dryers, computers, TV/VCR/DVDs.In some cases we are talking about people who don’t even have a fridge
or stove, a washer or dryer. Poor
and vulnerable populations tend not to be energy hogs.

A/C is no longer a luxury in extreme
heat. We need to figure out how we
can provide the relief people need. Project
Elder Cool in
Kansas Cityinstalled 426 air conditioners in the homes of vulnerable elderly, the oldest
was 106 years old. A common refrain
heard by “the air conditioning guys” is “I’m glad to see you!”

Do we really need dozens of deaths
before we do something?

Our Katrina

If we had a Spike Lee in
CanadaI think this is the kind of film he or she would have to make.
They would have to show the rest of
Canada:

-the shelter conditions that are not meant for long-term living,
including some, which I’ve discovered in communities outside of Toronto that
do not meet the UN Standard for Refugee camps

-the huge number of outdoor encampments that range from cardboard
and tarpaulin to more elaborate shacks such as Chris’ who lived under
Toronto’s Gardiner expressway

-the mean-spirited way city officials and even the police
collaborate to remove said structures and belongings

-the vulnerabilities of men and women who are pushed away from
safer city hall squares and public spaces because of new by-laws and NIMBY
neighbours and police who make it clear people are not wanted in public view

-the crummy motels that municipalities are increasingly forced to
use for emergency shelter for families with children because they don’t have
enough shelter space and they won’t create spaces

-the intolerable and unhealthy shelter conditions that leave people
vulnerable to bedbugs… to tuberculosis… to emerging viruses like
Norwalkor SARS…

-and while all this is going on, almost half of the $1 billion
dollars from the 2001 Affordable Housing Programme remains unspent, a
significant amount of that in Ontario
and
Toronto

Then I hope our film would show where
our politicians live, where they shop and what they say when they’re asked
about these issues. Condoleeza Rice
had lots of time for shoe shopping during the Katrina aftermath, and I suspect a
Canadian Spike Lee would be able to demonstrate that, in the face of our
disaster, most of our political leaders have way too much time on their hands.

Pressure and politics

I am very convinced that the public
cares about these issues. A recent
‘Raising the Roof’ survey showed that 80% of Canadians believe it is
possible to solve homelessness. Somehow
that sentiment is not being translated into action at the political level.

Historically, when most progress has
been made on the housing front it has been during times of minority governments.The current federal government is redefining its role and we must be
vigilant, and we must be clear that we insist they have a role in housing.

So, it is critical that you overcome any
political differences you might have, and find ways to mobilize. We appreciated the efforts made to join us in
Torontoon September 12 to fight for the temporary continuation of SCPI monies.

Politicians hate housing report cards
– how have your local politicians done when it comes to money promised, money
spent, number of units built and affordability?

November 22 is National Housing Day, the
day the big city mayors’ caucus of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities
first endorsed the 1998 declaration that homelessness was a national disaster. We will be holding a car rally, a form of protest that has been used in
the past in
Canada.A focus of the day will be on SCPI
continuation.

Please, I ask that you start today, to
make housing an election issue.